If you are serious musician or in a band, then you probably have a Bandcamp, a Facebook page, a Soundcloud, and maybe a Twitter or Instagram account. While those platforms are all well and good, at the end of they day they aren't enough. Your band needs a website.

Bandcamp is a solid platform for selling music digitally online, but you are limited in terms of how your content is presented, and it's hard to stand out against the millions of other Bandcamp pages begging users to take their free music. Facebook pages are a great way to interact with fans, but there plenty of people who don't use Facebook and the vast majority of those who do spend a lot more time looking at BuzzFeed quizzes than they do band pages. You need a central hub, where you can tie all this disparate tools together; therefore, you need a website.

The major blockers for most bands to getting a website is that websites are generally complicated, cost money, and take time to maintain. The good news is there are some affordable and relatively easy options to getting a basic site up and running. But even when bands get a site up and running, I find they rarely update it, post to it, or touch it at all, so it quickly becomes out of date. The success of your online presence relies heavily on your ability to constantly put out content, not just when you have a new song or show.

Below are step by step instructions to setting up a simple website for your band. 

Coming up with an unclaimed band name in the Internet age proves extrememly difficult. Almost every single-word noun has been taken at this point and most Google searches will yield a list of MySpace pages of a band from 5 years ago with your the name that you wanted.